Expectations in Grief

• Your grief will take longer than most people think.
• Your grief will take more energy than you would have ever imagined.
• You'll feel grief not only for the actual person you lost but also for all of the hopes, dreams and unfulfilled expectations you had for and with that person and for the needs that won't be met because of the death.
• Your grief will involve a wide variety of feelings and reactions, not just those that are usually thought of as grief (like depression and sadness).
• You might experience grief "spasms," sharp surges of grief that occur suddenly with no warning.
• You'll have trouble thinking (memory, organization and intellectual processing) and with making decisions.
• You may feel like you're going crazy — we have heard many people, adults and children say this after someone has died.

What Is Grief?

Grief is unique, and it’s also universal. Grief is normal. It’s a chaotic mixture of many feelings, including shock and panic, anger and fear, guilt and sadness. Grief is many questions, some of them answerable over time, some not. Grief takes time. And grief, ultimately, is love — love for the one who died.

Grief is unique and universal
Just like your fingerprints, every person’s journey of grief is unique to that person. Your grief is your own, and no one else can tell you how you ought to grieve.

Grief is also universal. There are certain characteristics of grief that are common to all of us who have suffered a loss.

Grief is natural and normal
Grief is not a sickness. Just because we’re grieving the death of someone we love doesn’t mean that we have some type of mental illness.

Grief is the totally normal, healthy group of feelings and reactions that people experience after someone they love dies.

Grief is many feelings
Grief is not a single feeling or experience. It is a complicated mixture of many feelings swirling together in a way that is often confusing. These feelings can include shock, panic, anger, fear, guilt, sadness, and more.

Grief is chaotic
If you ever thought about what you might feel after a death, you probably expected that you’d feel sad. You might have expected a few other feelings, too. But you probably never expected the tidal wave of so many feelings — and such strong feelings — happening in such a chaotic way.

That chaos, that not knowing what’s going on, is normal. Grief is feeling out of control.

Grief is a new world
Chaos is normal because we’re not just missing a person. We’re trying to figure out a whole new life. We’re trying to figure out where we fit in the world now that this person is no longer there, in the world with us.

Grief is questions
Grief also brings up a lot of questions — Why did this happen? Was it my fault? Who am I? Where do I fit? Who else will die? Who will take care of me? What is life now? What is my life now? Why me?

Part of grief is the process of discovering answers to some of these questions, and discovering that some of these questions have no answers. Thinking through these questions, over and over, takes a long time.

"I had so many unanswered questions running through my mind. Why did he have to die? What was going to happen to me? Would my pain ever go away? I felt angry and alone. None of my friends understood what I was going through. A lot of them stopped talking to me, probably because they didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to upset me." — Crystal, 22, whose father died when she was 14

Grief takes time
The death of the one we love is the first chapter in a lifetime of living without him or her. At every age, at every step along the way, we have to figure out how we’re going to manage without the one we love so dearly.

Understanding the new world we’re living in takes time. The reality that our loved one is never coming back also takes time to sink in. Because these things take time to work out, many teens have talked about the second year being harder at times than the shock and confusion of the first months after the death.

Grief is love
Ultimately, however, grief is love. If we didn’t love the person who died, we wouldn’t grieve. Grief is love not ever wanting to say goodbye. Grief is the connection — the continuing connection — to the person no longer with us.

Time to Move on?

Some people may tell you that you really should be over your grief by now. That it’s time to move on and forget about the one who died. People are well-meaning. They don’t want to see us in pain.

But we have just as much chance of flipping a switch and "getting over" a broken leg as we do of just "getting over" a broken heart. At least with a broken leg, others can see the cast and give us their concern. After a death, no one can see the pain in our heart. And broken legs heal a lot quicker than broken hearts do.

People may expect that if we just don’t think about the person who died, then we’ll stop missing him or her. They don’t realize that we can’t help thinking about that person. They don’t realize that we want to think about that person.

"What we have once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us." — Helen Keller

We can move on in life. But it takes time — usually a lot more time than most people expect. And remembering the person who died, the person we love, is part of this moving on.

Like living with a broken leg, dealing with a broken heart will force us to slow down. We can’t just go on as if nothing has happened. We need to take care of ourselves during this time.